Adam Williams, author of the The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure will give an illustrated talk about the Boxer Rebellion at the Bookworm in Beijing. The illustrated part of the talk includes photos, film clips and letters of missionaries about to be executed.

Date: 7:30pm, Friday November 12th, 2004
Venue: The Bookworm at Le Petit Gourmand (6416 7154)
Free

Below is a description of the event from the Bookworm's email.

Adam Williams is by all accounts a great storyteller. He has fired the imagination of many through his first novel, The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure, and also through his talks given to the Royal Geographical Society in Hong Kong, Chambers of Commerce in Shanghai and Beijing, and the Bookworm in 2003. Adam is full of fascinating stories about China in the past 150 years, this comes from his great passion for the region, and perhaps the fact that his family has lived here since the nineteenth century. Next week he will talk about the Boxers – a rebellion against foreign missionaries at the turn of the twentieth century.

“The Boxer episode was a great adventure, a most dangerous ordeal and more than that it gave foreigners a sense of justification for being there. After all, if you look at the century or so beforehand, foreigners’ incursions into China were not exactly glorious. Opium wars, burning of the Summer Palace, snatching territory, all in the greater cause of mercantile greed, left a slightly sour taste in people’s mouths. Up to now their behaviour had been at best shabby. In 1900, however, for the first time, it had been their turn to become the victims. Their missionaries had been massacred. Their legations besieged. They had fought back with heroism against ungodly hordes, and civilization – yes, civilization – had overcome. And everybody had behaved heroically – well almost everybody. At least they could congratulate themselves on having survived – and their values, those of Christianity against superstition, modernity against feudalism, had won the day. For the first time – ever really - in the story of Europe’s colonial experience in China – the foreigners appeared to themselves in a virtuous light.”

Come and listen to Adam talk on the Boxer Rebellion – History and Memory.

Adam was born and raised in Hong Kong. For the last eighteen years he has been the representative in Beijing of a Far East trading and services conglomerate. In 1999 he received an OBE for services to Sino-British trade.